Dr Alun Wyburn-Powell

Tuesday, 27 January 2015

It is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of
Winston Churchill and nearly seventy years since the 1945 election. Although he is remembered as a highly-successful politician,
Churchill in fact failed to win a seat in five of the 21 contests which he
fought, and as party leader he never led his party to win the most votes in an
election. Despite this, he served as prime minister of three very different
governments.

The first was the successful wartime coalition from May 1940
to May 1945. The second was the now almost-forgotten caretaker government,
which was in power from May to July 1945 after the other parties withdrew from
the coalition in advance of the general election. For thirteen of its members,
the 1945 Caretaker Government gave them their only ministerial appointment.
They included Ronnie Tree, son of Arthur Tree and Ethel Field, who was
appropriately enough appointed as a minister in the Department of Town and
Country Planning. One day David Cameron may look back and think that a
two-month single-party caretaker government, with a brief reward of office for
some of his overlooked MPs, might have been a good idea.

When the votes of the 1945 election were counted in July,
Churchill’s Conservative Party had gone down to a crushing defeat at the hands
of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party. Should Churchill have been surprised by his
defeat in 1945? Not really. Opinion polls were available and had consistently
been showing a solid lead for the Labour Party. But how did Churchill manage to
lose the 1945 election after leading the allies to victory in the war?

Among the excuses which the Conservatives offered was that
the Army Bureau of Current Affairs had indoctrinated service personnel to vote
Labour. This excuse was at least plausible, but also probably fairly flimsy.
Parties tend to cling on to strange excuses after a poor result. After one
by-election in the 1950s the Conservatives blamed the size of the constituency
for their lacklustre performance, although presumably it was the same size for
their opponents!

In 1945 the Conservatives lost the ‘ground war’. The party
was in a weakened state on the ground with a depleted band of agents. The
Conservatives, in contrast to the other parties, had stuck rigidly to the
spirit and the letter of the wartime electoral truce. They had only held one party
conference during the war and had put little effort into policy development and
constituency organisation.

Public memory had a bearing on the outcome of the 1945
election. Lloyd George was still considered to be the man who won the First
World War, but his record as prime minister after the war was dismal, with
broken promises, unemployment, industrial unrest and threats to start another
war. The popular conclusion was that good war leaders do not necessarily make
good peacetime leaders. In 1945 the Conservatives were also still tarred with
the taint of being the ‘Guilty Men’, so-called after a book which had appeared
in 1940, blaming the party for the policy of appeasement which had failed to
prevent the war.

British society had changed during the war and voters had
become less class-bound. Evacuation of urban children to rural areas, service
of all classes in the armed forces, and civilians sharing bomb shelters with
strangers, had all led to a new degree of social mixing. After the First World
War many people had wanted a return to life as it had been. After the second,
most people wanted a complete break with the past. The forward-looking 1945 Labour
pledge: ‘Let us face the future’ generated more enthusiasm that the
Conservatives’ plea to let Churchill ‘finish the job’.

Churchill bore much personal responsibility for the failure
of the Conservatives’ election campaign, including mis-handling a party
election radio broadcast in which he claimed that the Labour Party would have
to employ a form of ‘Gestapo’ to implement its policies. Labour leader, Clement
Attlee, a moderate and unassuming man, had been responsible for much of
Britain’s domestic policy during the war – exactly the area on which most
people wanted the post-war government to concentrate. Labour ministers had
proved themselves capable in key domestic roles. Although all the parties
supported the proposals of the Beveridge Report, the Labour Party was more
enthusiastic about its implementation than the Conservatives.

After his 1945 defeat, Churchill remained party leader and
led the Conservatives into the following general election in February 1950. But
he lost again. However, he was given one more opportunity and he did win the following
election in 1951 – at least in terms of seats. The Conservatives won fewer
votes but more seats than Labour, and went on to form a government over which
Churchill presided for three and a half years until he retired at the age of 80.
He survived another ten years and died on 24 January 1965.

A shorter version of my article above appeared on the Conversation: http://bit.ly/1BiUNmk

Monday, 19 January 2015

Political defections usually hit
the headlines, but sometimes parliamentarians can defect without anyone even noticing.
Most people think of a typical parliamentary defector as an MP crossing the
floor of the House of Commons to join a rival party, as Douglas Carswell and Mark
Reckless did in moving from the Conservatives to UKIP. Churchill is also widely
remembered for his ratting and re-ratting between the Conservatives and
Liberals.

However, with the growth of
multi-party politics, many defections do not necessarily involve the symbolic
crossing the floor from government to opposition benches, or vice versa. A
defection between two opposition parties does not involve crossing the floor,
nor does a transfer between parties in a governing coalition.

There have also been examples of
hybrid candidates, such as the Constitutionalists in 1924 who temporarily
straddled two parties – Liberal and Conservative. Labour and Co-op MPs, including
Ed Balls, carry two party labels. The Co-operative Party was established in
1917, but since 1927 has allied itself, but not merged, with the Labour Party.

Party allegiance is usually
defined as being in receipt of a party’s whip (a set of briefing papers), but
this can leave room for doubt. A whip can be sent and received, but not wanted.
There have been examples where an MP’s party allegiance is no longer clear, as
was the case with Cecil L’Estrange Malone in 1920, whose constituency chairman
had to write and ask him to which party he belonged.

So far, we have only looked at
the House of Commons. If it is not always easy to be certain of an MP’s party
allegiance, for members of the House of Lords it can be much more difficult
still.

The House of Lords effectively
has three sides - not just government and opposition benches, but also cross-benches.
There are currently 176 cross-benchers peers, organised to some extent as a
group, but not taking any party whip. Some senior Church of England bishops
(currently 24) also sit in the House of Lords. They do not belong to any
political party or grouping and are not considered to be cross-benchers either.
Peers do not have to stand in general elections under a party banner or send
out material to constituents. Many lords rarely attend parliament and do not
hold ministerial or party office, so there is little evidence of their party
allegiance (if any).

Sometimes when lords go a-leaping
from one party to another they do cause a bit of a stir, such as the transfers
from the Conservatives to UKIP by Lord Stevens of Ludgate, by Lord Willoughby
de Broke and by Lord Pearson of Rannoch.

But others can go unnoticed at
the time. Robert Munro was a Liberal MP until 1922. He then went to the House
of Lords as Baron Alness (the change of name making his career harder to
follow) and eventually in 1945 appeared in Churchill’s Caretaker Government,
suggesting that he considered himself a Conservative by then, although he never
announced a change of party allegiance.

Lord Trimble, the former Ulster
Unionist Party leader, is now a Conservative member of the House of Lords,
although the two parties are now separate.

Then there are peers with
hereditary titles, where succeeding generations take a different party whip
from their forebears. Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin went to the Lords
on his retirement, but his son Oliver, who became the second Earl Baldwin, took
the Labour whip. The current (fourth) Earl Baldwin is a cross-bencher. In the
opposite direction, the current Lord Attlee, grandson of Labour prime minister
Clement Attlee, is a Conservative. Viscount Tenby, grandson of Liberal prime
minister Lloyd George and son of a Conservative peer, is a cross-bencher. Lord
Trefgarne is a Conservative peer, although he is the son of George Garro-Jones,
who was a Liberal, then Labour, then a Liberal again. Viscount Simon, a Labour
peer, is the grandson of the first Viscount, who was a Liberal and later a
Liberal National politician.

So, although these ten lords went a-leaping, most of them leapt in the dark. Hardly anyone noticed.

A version of this article first appeared on the Conversation http://bit.ly/1xbtAWD

Saturday, 6 December 2014

Jeremy Thorpe is best remembered as the only British political
party leader to have gone on trial for conspiracy to murder. He was acquitted,
but the circumstances leading to his trial were so bizarre that they have
overshadowed almost everything else about his career, including his jumping
over people’s garden gates to deliver leaflets, his campaigning by hovercraft
and leading the Liberals to several spectacular by-election victories.

I went to interview Jeremy Thorpe at his home in London in
2001 when I was researching my biography of Clement Davies, the Liberal leader
immediately after the Second World War. Poor old Clem had a difficult life.
Three of his four children died at the age of 24 in unrelated incidents and
Clem was an alcoholic – a fact vehemently denied by some of his former
colleagues, but confirmed by his family. Despite all his problems, Clem Davies
did hold the Liberal Party together so that there was something left to lead.
Clem was succeeded by Jo Grimond and then in turn by Jeremy Thorpe from 1967 to
1976.

By the time I met him, Jeremy Thorpe had been affected by
Parkinson’s disease for over twenty years. His voice was barely more than a
whisper and he walked with the aid of two sticks. He lived with his second wife,
Maria Donata Nanetta Paulina Gustava
Erwina Wilhelmine, formerly the Countess of Harewood, known simply as Marion.
She died earlier this year and Jeremy died this week at the age of 85.

Their house must have been one of the most expensive
addresses in London. It left a lasting, or rather several lasting, impressions
on me. My first impression had plenty of time to develop. I was shown into a
huge square room full of antiques, books, ornaments and dust. There were
beautiful cabinets, but with cracked glass in some of the doors. There was a
bust of Jeremy on a desk. (Incidentally, where should one keep one’s own bust?)
The dust and the bust were the overriding memories. Time passed, maybe twenty
minutes, no-one appeared and I began to look around for the skeletons of
previous visitors. Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I looked into
the next room. It was almost identical to the first – book, antiques, dust and
no sign that anyone had been in there for years.

Eventually I was shown up to Jeremy’s study on the first
floor – a small, brightly-lit room with Formica furniture, resembling an
examination room at a clinic more than a study in a luxurious house at one of London’s
grandest addresses. Jeremy was wary, but helpful and courteous. I think I
managed to catch most of what he said.

Next I visited Emlyn Hooson, a parliamentary colleague of
Jeremy’s. Emlyn had entered Parliament as Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire at the
by-election caused by Clem Davies’s death in 1962. By chance Emlyn ended up
being the first person to hear the full story of Jeremy’s alleged relationship
with Norman Scott, which set off the chain of events ending at the Old Bailey.
Norman Scott turned up at the House of Commons, asking to see the most senior
person available from the Liberal Party. Emlyn Hooson fitted the bill, as the
only one of the party’s MPs who could be found in the building. Emlyn listened
politely, but incredulously, to a story of a gay relationship (illegal at the
time in the early 1960s) which had gone wrong.

Eventually, Norman Scott’s Great Dane dog, Rinka, was shot
dead on Exmoor by an airline pilot, letters written by Jeremy to Norman
appeared in the press, including one with the immortal line ‘Bunnies can and
will go to France’. A plot was alleged that involved Jeremy Thorpe conspiring
with others to murder Norman Scott. The case was delayed while Jeremy fought
and lost his seat in the 1979 general election. He was cleared on all charges,
but his subsequent attempts at rehabilitating his career and entering the House
of Lords all met with rebuff. He did publish a fragmentary memoir, which
glossed over pretty much everything about the trial, but which did reveal
another claim to fame. It turns out that Jeremy Thorpe was also the only party
leader whose mother was a horsemeat butcher (during the war).

It all leads me to think that had the 1967 Sexual Offences
Act (which decriminalised homosexuality) been passed earlier, all of this could
have been avoided, Rinka could have lived out her dog’s life, and just think
how useful Jeremy Thorpe’s expertise could have been in Parliament during the
horsemeat scandal.

Wednesday, 19 November 2014

UKIP’s policies could actually cause an increase in immigration. In view of Nigel Farage’s statement (apparently contradicting Mark
Reckless) that UKIP immigration policies would not be retrospective, many EU migrants
would be likely to rush to the country before the controls were implemented.

Migrants who had come to the UK temporarily might not leave,
if they thought that they might not be able to come back again.

Migrants who were still allowed to come to the UK would on
average come from further away and therefore be more likely to want to stay
longer, bring families or start families in the UK.

Under UKIP’s policies, with a withdrawal from the EU, the outflow
of mainly older British people, especially to Spain and France would reduce or could
even be reversed.

The current system of migration and border control does not
work well. There are estimated to be around 500,000 illegal immigrants in the
UK, but no-one knows the real figure. The system is still very porous, even
after successive governments have tried to improve the system. Illegal
immigrants and gangs would be more likely to exploit the creaking system as it
would be under added strain.

And then there are UKIP’s climate change policies. The
impact of uncontrolled climate change could dwarf all the other issues, when it
comes to migration. Few people would leave Britain if the climate became warmer
and sea levels rose. However, virtually uncontrollable surges of refugees could
be displaced by drought, storms, floods, drinking water shortages and rising
sea levels in countries such as Bangladesh and parts of Africa. Many could seek
refuge in the UK.

Will Rochester and Strood come to be seen as the turning of the
tide for UKIP? The turn of a tide is always difficult to spot at the time.
Waves come and go, but eventually the direction becomes clear.

The peak support in a national opinion poll for UKIP so far
is 25% in the Survation poll on 10 October 2014. Survation tend to show the
highest figures for UKIP support among the polling companies, but their more
recent polls have shown UKIP support below the peak at 23%. Populus tend to
show the lowest levels of UKIP support. Their peak figure was 15% and their
most recent poll showed 11% support for UKIP. The recent trend in UKIP support
from all the major polling companies is down, not up.

The peak of 25% UKIP support compares to the peak for the
Liberal Democrats of 34% before the 2010 election and 50.5% for the SDP/Liberal
Alliance in 1981.

The scale of defections to UKIP is still much smaller than
those to the SDP in the 1980s. The SDP received 28 sitting Labour MPs and one
Conservative.

The history of new parties is one of fragility. The British
Union of Fascists, the SDP, the New Party, Veritas, Common Wealth and the
Referendum Party all came and went. UKIP has shown a tendency to fragment. Of
the 13 UKIP MEPs elected in 2009, five (38%) had left the party by the time of
the 2014 European election.

Overall, by-election victors who capture a seat from another
party have on average around a 50% rate of retaining the seat at the following
general election. The opinion poll from Lord Ashcroft completed on 10 November
showed UKIP on course to win the Rochester and Strood by-election on 20
November, but likely to lose the seat at the general election in May 2015.

It is not easy to spot the change in a tide. But tides do tend
to turn at some point.

About Alun

My interest in politics started at the age of two, when my father stood as the Liberal candidate in Twickenham in the 1959 general election. I am now a political historian. My first degree was from Downing College, Cambridge and I researched for my PhD at Leicester University, where I am now an honorary research fellow and a member of the university's panel of election experts. I am also a visiting lecturer in the Journalism Department at City University, London. I have taken part in political discussions on BBC Radio 4 Westminster Hour, BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio Wales Sunday Supplement and Called to Order, BBC Radio Nottingham First World War centenary commemorations and BBC Radio Leicester programmes among others.
I live in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire with my American-born wife, Diana a former radio presenter, who is now a speech and language therapist doing postgraduate research at the University of York and my son, Chris who is studying to be a climate scientist.
You can contact me at aww5 'at' le.ac.uk or Alun.Wyburn-Powell.1 'at' city.ac.uk

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Defectors and the Liberal Party...'gives a valuable new perspective on the decline of the Liberal Party' LSE Review of Books.Clement Davies - Liberal Leader...'an excellent biography' Anthony Howard, the Times.